Joe Lamantia.com

The good peo­ple at Chi Nether­lands just posted video of my talk “Play­ing Well With Oth­ers: Inter­ac­tion Design and Social Design for Aug­mented Real­ity” at the Web and Beyond 2010 here in Ams­ter­dam in June.  It’s couched as a col­lec­tion of design prin­ci­ples for the oncom­ing cat­e­gory of social aug­mented inter­ac­tions made pos­si­ble by the new medium of aug­mented real­ity.  But this talk is also a call to action for all mak­ers of expe­ri­ences for the emerg­ing engage­ment space of every­ware to focus on the human and the humane per­spec­tives as we explore the new inter­ac­tions made possible.

The out­line of the talk is roughly:

1. Overview of aug­mented reality
2. Social inter­ac­tion per­spec­tive on cur­rent AR experiences
3. Def­i­n­i­tion of ‘social aug­mented experiences’
4. Com­mon inter­ac­tion design pat­terns for AR
5. Social ‘anti-patterns’ lim­it­ing design of aug­mented experiences
6. Design prin­ci­ples for social aug­mented experiences

(The audio qual­ity is quite good, and the cam­era­man cap­tured most of the slides nicely — so this is a record­ing worth watching.)

This year’s TWAB fea­tured sev­eral talks on aug­mented real­ity, ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing and related top­ics; you’ll find record­ings of these on the Chi Ned­er­land Vimeo chan­nel: http://vimeo.com/chinederland

Many thanks to the orga­niz­ers and vol­un­teers for putting on such a well-run event!

TWAB2010: Joe Laman­tia — Play­ing well with oth­ers: inter­ac­tion design and social design for aug­mented real­ity from Chi Ned­er­land on Vimeo.

Thanks to all who came to the Muziekge­bouw on a lovely early sum­mer day to talk about the emerg­ing engage­ment space of social aug­mented expe­ri­ences for the third edi­tion of The Web And Beyond con­fer­ence in Amsterdam.

For ref­er­ence, here’s the ses­sion descrip­tion from the offi­cial program:

Aug­mented real­ity blends the real world and the Inter­net in real time, mak­ing many new kinds of prox­im­ity, con­text, and loca­tion based expe­ri­ences pos­si­ble for indi­vid­u­als and groups. Despite these many pos­si­bil­i­ties, we know from his­tory that the long term value and impact of aug­mented real­ity for most peo­ple will depend on how well these expe­ri­ences inte­grate with ordi­nary social set­tings, and sup­port every­day inter­ac­tions. Yet the inter­ac­tion pat­terns and behav­ior we see in cur­rent AR expe­ri­ences seem almost ‘anti-social’ by design. This is an impor­tant gap that design must close in order to cre­ate suc­cess­ful AR offer­ings. In other words, much like chil­dren going to school for the first time, AR must to learn to ‘play well with oth­ers’ to be valu­able and suc­cess­ful. This pre­sen­ta­tion reviews the inter­ac­tion design pat­terns com­mon to aug­mented real­ity, sug­gests tools to help under­stand and improve the ’social matu­rity’ of AR prod­ucts and appli­ca­tions, and shares design prin­ci­ples for cre­at­ing gen­uinely social aug­mented expe­ri­ences that inte­grate well with human social set­tings and interactions.

Since I wrote about the user expe­ri­ence of aug­mented real­ity less than two weeks ago, the most impor­tant devel­op­ment is the arrival of aug­mented iPhone apps (unof­fi­cially for the moment, offi­cially in September).

Why is this so impor­tant, when Wik­i­tude and other AR Android apps have been avail­able for almost a year?  Bring­ing aug­mented real­ity to the iPhone changes the cul­tural assump­tions made about AR expe­ri­ences as a class of offer­ing. Endors­ing AR expe­ri­ences for iPhone users moves aug­mented real­ity from the geek realm of Android and Google, to the chic world of Apple.  Cul­tur­ally, the assump­tions we make about the new prod­ucts and ser­vices from Apple and Google are dri­ven largely by the dif­fer­ences in way we per­ceive the two brands.  Apple is chic, while Google is geek.

Look­ing Ahead

Con­nect­ing the Apple brand to aug­mented expe­ri­ences will per­suade many peo­ple to try out AR.  Yet as I’ve said, and many oth­ers as well, get­ting the user expe­ri­ence of aug­mented real­ity ‘right’ is absolutely the crit­i­cal ele­ment to the long term via­bil­ity of this new class of expe­ri­ences.  This entails two efforts.

First, design­ers must refine the expe­ri­ences offered by all those AR appli­ca­tions based on the four clas­sic inter­ac­tion pat­terns known so far — Head-Up Dis­play, Tri­corder, Holochess, and X-ray Vision.  Two fac­tors make refine­ment essen­tial: com­pe­ti­tion from other AR offer­ings that reduces the nov­elty value of your expe­ri­ence, and increased ‘load’ on the UX in the form of actual use for every­day pur­poses in the com­plex set­ting of real life.  Think about try­ing to choose where to get lunch for the after­noon by sort­ing through 1500 list­ings for cof­fee shops and restau­rants while stand­ing on a street cor­ner in the rain in Lon­don hold­ing your phone aloft.  The func­tional aspects of AR expe­ri­ences just aren’t refined enough to han­dle the inter­ac­tion design, visu­al­iza­tion, and con­tex­tual sen­si­tiv­ity chal­lenges implied. [Pre­dic­tion: AR usage cases will nat­u­rally set­tle on a set of com­mon sce­nar­ios that bal­ance the strengths and weak­nesses of each of the four clas­sic pat­terns.  More spec­u­la­tion on that in a later post.]

Sec­ond, design­ers must address the gaps in the set of con­cepts now used as the basis for imag­in­ing new aug­mented expe­ri­ences.  I flagged six ‘miss­ing’ pat­terns in the range of expe­ri­ences offered so far; Loner, Sec­ond Hand Smoke, Pay No Atten­tion To the Man Behind the Cur­tain, The Invis­i­ble Man!, Tun­nel Vision, and AR for AR’s Sake (see the arti­cle for details).  I’m sure the very savvy read­ers of this blog can iden­tify even more.

I hope all the AR inno­va­tors, design­ers, and entre­pre­neurs work­ing hard on the crest of this break­ing wave of tech­nol­ogy find ways to take on both of these tasks.  If they can’t refine the exist­ing mod­els and fill in those expe­ri­ence gaps, then nei­ther Apple chic nor Google geek cred will suf­fice to make aug­mented real­ity viable in the long term.  And what could lit­er­ally be a new way of see­ing the world — one with legit­i­mate poten­tial for chang­ing our behav­ior with regard to urban spaces, the envi­ron­ment, social struc­tures, play, and eco­nom­ics, among just a few spheres of human activ­ity — will remain lit­tle more than a cam­era obscura style curiosity.

Mar­shall Kirk­patrick of Read­WriteWeb links to Inside Out: Inter­ac­tion Design for Aug­mented Real­ity (the lat­est Every­ware col­umn) in two recent sto­ries track­ing the fast-moving aug­mented real­ity space; Aug­mented Real­ity: Five Bari­ers to a Web That’s Every­where and, and Robot­Vi­sion: A Bing-powered iPhone Aug­mented Real­ity Browser. 

Thanks, Mar­shall!

And as a bonus, Tim O’Reilly tweeted about Marshall’s arti­cle.  I doubt that Tim reads this feed, but it’s always nice to be rec­og­nized, even indirectly.

A quick run­down on my fall speak­ing sched­ule so far.

First up is BlogTalk 2009, in Jeju, Korea on Sep­tem­ber 15 and 16. There I’ll be talk­ing about ‘The Archi­tec­ture of Fun’ — shar­ing a new design lan­guage for emo­tion that’s been in use in the game design indus­try for quite a while.  [Dis­clo­sure: While it’s a priv­i­lege to be on the pro­gram with so many inno­v­a­tive and insight­ful social media fig­ures, I’m also really look­ing for­ward to the food in Korea ]

Next up is EuroIA in Copen­hagen, Sep­tem­ber 26 and 27.  For the lat­est edi­tion of this largest gath­er­ing of the user expe­ri­ence com­mu­nity in Europe, I’ll reprise my Archi­tec­ture of Fun talk.

Wrap­ping up the sched­ule so far is the Janus Boye con­fer­ence in Aarhus, Novem­ber 3 — 6.  Here  I’m pre­sent­ing a half-day tuto­r­ial titled Design­ing Infor­ma­tion Expe­ri­ences.  This is an exten­sive, detailed tuto­r­ial that any­one work­ing in infor­ma­tion man­age­ment will ben­e­fit from, as it com­bines two of my pas­sions; design­ing for peo­ple, and using frame­works to enhance solu­tion scope and effectiveness.

Here’s the descrip­tion from the offi­cial program:

When design­ing for infor­ma­tion retrieval expe­ri­ences, the cus­tomer must always be right. This tuto­r­ial will give you the tools to uncover user needs and design the con­text for deliv­er­ing infor­ma­tion, whether that be through search, tax­onomies or some­thing entirely different.

What you will learn:
•    A broadly applic­a­ble method for under­stand­ing user needs in diverse infor­ma­tion access con­texts
•    A col­lec­tion of infor­ma­tion retrieval pat­terns rel­e­vant to mul­ti­ple set­tings such as enter­prise search and infor­ma­tion access, ser­vice design, and prod­uct and plat­form management

We will also dis­cuss the impact of orga­ni­za­tional and cul­tural fac­tors on design deci­sions and why it is essen­tial, that you frame busi­ness and tech­nol­ogy chal­lenges in the right way.

The tuto­r­ial builds on lessons learned from a large cus­tomer project focus­ing on trans­form­ing user expe­ri­ence. The scope of this pro­gram included ~25 sep­a­rate web-delivered prod­ucts, a large doc­u­ment repos­i­tory, inte­grated cus­tomer ser­vice and sup­port processes, con­tent man­age­ment, tax­on­omy and ontol­ogy cre­ation, and search and infor­ma­tion retrieval solu­tions. Joe will share the inno­vate meth­ods and sur­pris­ing insight that emerged in the process.

Janus Boye gath­ers lead­ing local and inter­na­tional prac­ti­tion­ers, and is a new event for me, so I’m very much look­ing for­ward to it.

I hope to see some of you at one or more of these gath­er­ings that alto­gether span half the world!

I’m very happy to announce that Inside Out: Inter­ac­tion Design for Aug­mented Real­ity — the lat­est install­ment of my col­umn Every­ware @UX Mat­ters -  is live now.  (Tim­ing is some­times the writer’s friend, as I was at the Layar event Mon­day night here in Ams­ter­dam just the day before, and had the chance to talk with some of their team.)

AR is more of a per­spec­tive and class of expe­ri­ences than an instance of new tech­nol­ogy, so I wanted to approach the sub­ject from the spe­cific per­spec­tive of user expe­ri­ence and inter­ac­tion design.  Reac­tions from the aug­mented real­ity com­mu­nity are pos­i­tive so far; Claire Boon­stra of Layar, and no less than the inim­itable Tish Shute of Ugo­Trade, have all been kind enough to rec­om­mend it.  Thanks to them and to every­one who’s tweeted and posted this one.

As we explore the role aug­mented real­ity will play in our gigan­tic exper­i­ment with every­ware, we should keep in mind that the map is not the ter­ri­tory.  But there is no deny­ing an effec­tive map will surely help point the way as you try to find your way around a strange new coun­try.

I’ve joined the John­nies!  The good peo­ple at Johnny Hol­land Mag­a­zine just pub­lished Learn­ing From Games: A Lan­guage For Design­ing Emo­tion.  This arti­cle is a intro­duc­tion to the ideas I talk about under the head­ing ‘Archi­tec­tures of Fun’, which is my per­spec­tive on the great research and design frame­work built by lead­ing games con­sul­tant Nicole Laz­zaro, of Xeo Design.  Check it out, and let the rest of the Johnny com­mu­nity know what you think about this pow­er­ful lan­guage for design­ing the emo­tional ele­ments of experiences.

What hap­pens when *every­thing* is des­ignable? When the bound­aries between human­ity, tech­nol­ogy, and the larger envi­ron­ment dis­ap­pear? Design­ing Post-humanity: Every­ware In the Far Future, the lat­est install­ment of my col­umn on user expe­ri­ence and ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing in UXmat­ters, takes a look at these ques­tions. Post-humans, ubi­comp, and sci­ence fic­tion may seem like strange ter­ri­tory for user expe­ri­ence pro­fes­sion­als, but by con­sid­er­ing these kinds of futures today, we make many impor­tant deci­sions about who we will [all!] be tomorrow.

**Update: Bruce Ster­ling just posted about it in his Beyond the Beyond blog at Wired. Thanks for notic­ing, Bruce!

Two quick updates on things hap­pen­ing other places.

First, the lat­est install­ment of Every­ware: Design­ing the Ubiq­ui­tous Expe­ri­ence (my col­umn for UXmat­ters) was pub­lished back in March. It explores the world of Ver­nor Vinge’s story Syn­thetic Serendip­ity from the expe­ri­ence design per­spec­tive. Vinge is justly reknowned as an SF author, but what makes Syn­thetic Serendip­ity worth read­ing closely is the dense col­lec­tion of ideas it shares: aug­mented real­ity, wear­able com­put­ing sys­tems, a network-based co-creation econ­omy open to all par­tic­i­pa­tion by peo­ple of all ages, the games vs. real­ity inver­sion, gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences in adap­ta­tion to tech­no­log­i­cal change, etc.

Mostly, I like Syn­thetic Serendip­ity as an entry point into the ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing space because it presents a pic­ture of the future from the view­point of an ordi­nary kid, who has ordi­nary con­cerns; go to school, play video games, stay out of trou­ble with friends.

In the com­pan­ion piece in draft now, I look much fur­ther ahead, explor­ing sce­nar­ios that con­sider what hap­pens when the bound­aries sep­a­rat­ing humans from the envi­ron­ment blur and dis­solve, and human­ity itself becomes an object of design.

Sec­ond, and related, Jeff Parks just posted the pod­cast of a group dis­cus­sion on ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing that he orga­nized at the IA Sum­mit in Mem­phis. You’ll hear me along with Jeff, Steve Baty, Will Evans, Matthew Milan, John Tir­mandi, Joe Sokohl, Todd Zaki War­fel as we share exam­ples, ideas, and ques­tions about the inter­sec­tion of user expe­ri­ence and ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing. Thanks to Jeff for mak­ing this hap­pen — it was a fun ses­sion, and I hope you enjoy lis­ten­ing as much as we enjoyed record­ing it.

I’ve posted my slides and mate­ri­als from the Beyond Find­abil­ity work­shop Andrew Hin­ton, Livia Labate, Matthew Milan and I put on at the IA Sum­mit in Mem­phis recently.

This set of mate­ri­als addresses some of the most impor­tant ques­tions for prac­ti­tion­ers con­sid­er­ing a framework-based approach to design: why frame­warks mat­ter for user expe­ri­ence and inter­ac­tion design, what frame­works are use­ful for, and how you can work with them effectively.

Why *do* frame­works mat­ter? As I’m argu­ing, look around and you’ll see pro­found shifts chang­ing the struc­tural makeup of the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment, the con­texts and bound­aries of the expe­ri­ences, and the role of pro­fes­sional designers.

For design­ers, very com­pli­cated and inter­est­ing prob­lems are on the way: think of Mike Kuniavsky’s work defin­ing some of the fun­da­men­tal con­cepts behind the ‘smart things’ that will inhabit this new design envi­ron­ment, such as infor­ma­tion shad­ows and ser­vice avatars. It’s plain that this world will require new tools, and I believe frame­works are part of that toolkit. (See my col­umn Every­ware: Design for the Ubiq­ui­tous Expe­ri­ence for ongo­ing perspective.)

And check out the slides for the rest of the work­shop

Noth­ing bet­ter than blues, bar­be­cue, and Build­ing Blocks!